He himself voted by mail last week on the occasion of an election in Florida. Donald Trump signed a decree on Tuesday to tighten up this mail-in voting, ahead of the mid-term elections in November, arguing that this practice was responsible for fraud, a claim that has never been supported by evidence.
“I don’t see how this can be challenged in court,” said the American president who has been protesting for years against an electoral system supposedly against him, who never acknowledged his defeat in the 2020 presidential election against Joe Biden.
The Republican has repeatedly expressed the desire to tighten control over elections, which are the responsibility of individual states and not the federal government, as the mid-term legislative elections approach.
A year ago, he had already signed a decree aiming to restrict mail-in voting and impose stricter checks on voter lists. Several experts at the time believed that the text exceeded executive powers.
Republicans in the United States against this vote
In general, Republicans criticize mail-in voting, which has significantly expanded in the United States following the Covid-19 pandemic, for favoring fraud and fueling suspicions about the regularity of voting and results.
These criticisms are baseless, as investigations conducted after the 2020 election found no evidence of fraud. However, the main goal for the conservative camp is to cast doubt on the vote in order to challenge it in case of unfavorable results.
The Brookings Institution, a left-leaning think tank, analyzed electoral data collected by the conservative Heritage Foundation and found only 39 cases of fraud out of over 100 million ballots over three decades.
The US Supreme Court has debated in mid-March about the use of mail-in voting, specifically the acceptability of ballots received after election day but postmarked no later than the day of the vote. The Court is expected to make a decision by the end of its annual session, in late June, and its ruling could apply as early as the mid-term elections in November 2026.
